Today's WSJ has a surprising article about Google, that all but declares that free Internet phone service will put the Baby Bells out of business. Maybe so, but the real significance is not Google's offering of voice -- that's old hat by now -- but its use of free wireless broadband to get the service into the marketplace while bypassing a monstrous regulatory slowdown in Washington over whether to apply old telephone rules or old cable rules to new broadband services.
What Google really brings to the table are massive, massive server farms, and the knowhow to deliver individually customized data accurately, instantly and securely. Servers "serve" information. Don't think just Web pages or voice calls or video but all the information and data needed for the fully digital lifestyle. Microsoft, the cable companies, the Bells and others are converging on this business model. The phone companies are trying to get their feet wet with IPTV -- Internet television -- a largely "on demand" service, dispatching individualized content to millions of customers' TVs.
But these efforts are bogged down in a political battle over rewriting the 1996 telecom act, in theory to deregulate all forms of broadband. That sounds straightforward, but even in the GOP-dominated House, the leading bill, pushed by Rep. Joe Barton, has Verizon hopping mad -- because it seems to distinguish what kind of cable set-top box is deserving of deregulation and what kind isn't. Tom Tauke, the former Iowa Republican Congressman who now serves a chief deregulation lobbyist for Verizon, complained that, in typical fashion, "Before we've entered the horse race, some on Capitol Hill are adding weight to the horse and adding length the track."
Google, by offering to provide free wireless to grateful municipalities, hopes to be far down the road in providing the new services while the traditional rivals are still fighting on Capitol Hill. Indeed, Google has been quietly buying up unused Internet backbone capacity for months, making clear that it has much bigger things in mind than just delivering voice calls.
What do you all think?
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Originally Posted by Have At You 
